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Taylor Swift’s smash 2012 album, Red, exhibited only the barest, cosmetic tethers to her country beginnings, so the logical next step was to plunge headlong into 21st-century pop music in its purest form.

The 24-year-old, Pennsylvania-born superstar makes no bones about 1989’s position as a turning point in her five-album catalogue, bidding farewell to the Nashville skyline and embracing the bright lights of big-city life on opening track “Welcome to New York” with a verve that would make the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce proud. Guitars are gone, gleaming synths are in, homespun, everygirl confessionals supplanted by ruthlessly engineered electro-pop anthems cooked up in tandem with such high-priced hitmakers as the ubiquitous Max Martin.

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Swift was already as big as big gets — she even topped the Canadian iTunes chart last week with eight seconds of hiss accidentally uploaded to the web — but evidently she’s set her sights on getting bigger.

She’ll probably succeed. She’s lost some of that distinctly Swift-ian charm and, truth be told, a little of her soul in the transition to a more routine species of contemporary robo-pop already popularly practiced by everyone from Katy Perry to Icona Pop, while the whooshing, monolithic production is occasionally a touch too overwrought (see, for instance, “Out of the Woods”) to suit her diarist’s vignettes of romance in various states of giddiness and/or disarray.

That said, lead single “Shake It Off” is an irresistibly bumpity-bumpin’ slab of hip-hop-informed fluff riding a choice sax loop; the plush, gliding “All You Had to Do Was Stay” has a nagging chorus that will be most welcome on the radio airwaves through the winter months; and the cheerleader-ish shout-along “Bad Blood” is a proper keeper on delivery.

And the best of 1989 retains the easy melodicism of Swift’s previous work despite dressing it up in grander, gaudier attire. There’s just less of Taylor Swift present on the record and more of every other bankable pop star out there at the moment, which is a pity since Swift was doing just fine without chasing her peers into facelessness.

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